In this blog, Marsha Chan, "The Pronunciation Doctor," shares some of her professional development workshops and other ideas for language learning and teaching.

Monday, April 29, 2013

Stretching content words with a rubber band

In the previous post, I showed spectrograms of words in connected speech to demonstrate that stressed syllables, content words and especially focus words are longer and stronger than function words. In this post, I demonstrate the vowel length with a very simple tool: a rubber band.

As I demonstrate to students in the first video below, I exaggerate the lengthening of vowels while stretching the rubber band. The objectives include the following.

To absorb the concept that content words are stressed and function words are compressed (theory)

To match the physical stretching of the rubber band with the vocal lengthening of vowels (productive skill)

In the second video, I demonstrate at a more normal story pace.

In the third video, students practice the technique in pairs.

Stretching a rubber band while pronouncing the sounds of longer duration is much more than a trick. According to Olle Kjellin, MD, PhD, research scientist, language teacher and Swedish Speech Doctor, this action "co-activates the non-linguistic hemisphere and thereby increases the brain's interhemispheric communication, which in turn increases the robustness of the newly formed skill."

Stretching content words with a rubber band (modeling with exaggeration)

Hi Marsha! Rubber bands are great props for pronunciation classes. This will help my students pronounce the content words and emphasize them clearly. I'm definitely going to use rubber bands in my next class.